OK, maybe those aren’t quite the real figures, but at some point these headlines just become giant neon “LOOK AT ALL THESE IMPRESSIVE NUMBERS” signs. That said, the DayZ alpha is definitely a sprinter, not a shambler, given that it raced to 172,500 copies sold (and counting) in only 24 hours. Maybe this whole zombie fad has a chance of catching on after all, despite the fact that fairies, goblins, and poofy haired troll figurines are massively outpacing them in the pop-culture-sphere-o-scape right now.

Bohemia CEO Maruk Spanel made the announcement on his tumblr, stating simply:

I didn’t find it that surprising. DayZ spawned/invigorated a bizarre subgenre but none of the games that followed really scratched the same itch. Similar games have exploded in popularity so DayZ’s potential market has only grown.

I bought it last night, spent 3 hours trying to connect to a server, then went to bed. It’s a bit frustrating at the moment but still looking forward to getting into at some point over Christmas. I imagine that my connection issues will be down to the nearly 200000 people trying to connect at the same time.

Zombies are a mixed bag at the moment – while they optimise them and make sure that having them won’t explodinate the servers, there’s not many of them, they don’t respawn, and their behaviour is kooky to say the least. Some will let you walk right up to them and flip the bird, others will spot you from 200m away and chase you for three miles. They’re definitely an improvement, even at this early stage, but as I understand it, the dev team aren’t even close to ‘happy’ with them right now.

As for the server issue, yeah, apparently people managed to throw up a few attempts at ‘private hives’ last night without the server files, and Steam Auth went loopy because of it. Problem seems to have been sorted now.

Gah, Grayson – enough with the “comically exaggerated numbers” type of jokes. All the time, man… all the frickin’ time. Unless you are in fact a bot writing these articles – then you’re excused, carry on.

Please Mr Grayson, never ever stop with the “comically exaggerated numbers” type of jokes. At each occurrence, my laughter is increased 2x. And if you are a bot writing these jokes, you are an inspired bot (definitely with oily and tanned muscles).

I’m sitting here recalling how many of my friends, I included, have bought Arma 2 + DLC to play DayZ mod. In contrast the shrugs and grunts I’ve seen and heard in relation to the news of the DayZ early access… So far I can see the craze is largely over.

Could be for the best. The second wave of people who got into it seemed to develop a certain bro pride over being in it for the “Raw PvP/griefing hell!/living the libertarian dream” or something. Where the developers seem to still want it to be a zombie survival game to at least some degree. So a certain sector of the original audience may not carry over.

I’m interested in what people are thinking of this so far. Its release unfortunately coincides with a yearlong sojourn of mine during which I am accompanied only by a netbook-level laptop, so I won’t be able to play it for a while. But the mod, during its first few months, was perhaps the most profound gaming experience of my adult life. I really hope some of that magic has been recreated.

I wouldn’t worry too much about this, they’ve got big warnings that this thing will be full of bugs and that the official release won’t be until (iirc) 2015, so you can pick up the completed version once your yearlong sojourn is over

-The general feel of it still feels very clunky. Movement is improved, the inventory is definitely improved, but there are still a lot of quirks which feel very arma-esque. Zombies running through walls, when you try to look at an object to pick it up it doesn’t detect your cursor over it very well. Things like that. It’s obviously alpha but I would of hoped the latter, being down to arma’s interaction system, would of been replaced/fixed by now.

-The messaging system telling you that you’re hungry/thirsty whatever is a bad idea imo. It’s like a toddler paging you every 20 seconds. Some of it is also quite vague at first, you have to learn about the game’s systems a bit to understand it. Like when it says ‘I feel like taking a nap’ you can’t actually do that yet. I realise they are working on this stuff, but I much preferred the icons in the mod- they were less intrusive and clearer.

-Performance is improved. Lag is improved. The work they’ve done to the server system shows I think. Performance drops and lag still exist occasionally, but you have to remember the scope of this game- it’s never going to run as well as your standard fps which only simulates a fraction of what this game is doing.

-The biggest improvement is the environment. It’s detail is much improved, the enter-able buildings and huge variety of items make checking through towns now worthwhile and it’s takes a long time to sweep through them completely. They’ve added more detail to all the towns, added a few military bases and other sites of interest around the map too. I haven’t been to the far north but looking from a map they’ve also fleshed out a lot of the terrain north of the airfields.

Overall I’m having fun with it. It’s still the buggy, clunky DayZ we all know, but a greatly improved version of it. There’s clearly a lot of stuff to add and a long way to go, but it’s only going to get better.

They put status Icons back in with Patch #1, and the hunger/thirst messages are MUCH less frequent. You don’t faint from exhaustion anymore it seems, I hear reports that you can sprint as long as you want at the moment.

We experimented a bit yesterday and my friend force fed me disenfetctant spray; the status icon “sick” comes up, which seemed to spread to my mate when he was near for a bit and taking a blood sample from me.
After a while I puked and fainted, but saline solution was able to bring me back; with charcoal tablets in good condition i was able to bring the sickness icon from redish to yellow, but not the “damaged” ones.

Just curious, but will they re-introduce the bandit skin mechanism in this? I did have a bit of fun with the mod (even going as far as to printing out a 4″x5″ map of the area and pinning it over my desk) but it did degenerate into a shoot-em-up I found.

I’m pretty sure they won’t have anything as overt as ‘bandit skins’ or similar – Rocket has said he’s not a fan of things being that black and white.
I think the whole ‘kill on sight’ issue is being given some thought for further down the line, but right now they’re just trying to get everything working. It’s a bit of a strange beast at the moment, as there’s very little to do due to the obvious lack of content, so it’s about 50% fully-geared veterans finding ways of killing time and 50% wide-eyed newbies being simultaneously completely overwhelmed and excited.

I’m still largely failing to see how this DayZ is different from the last, except for the fact that cheating won’t be so rampant. I also understand that still time people pay the mod’s creator (which is a good thing imho) instead of Bohemia Interactive, but yet I fail to see why this DayZ would end up any different from the last one, especially when mr Hall doesn’t seem to know exactly how to handle stuff like banditry and the general boredom of PvE players.

In fairness, Rocket has never had to deal with the Banditry and boredom issue, so it’s unfair to judge him on those terms. Those are issues that cropped up in the mod, and by the time they became more of a problem than the actual bugs, he was working exclusively on the Standalone. The mod hasn’t been touched by Rocket or BIS guys for the best part of 18 months as far as I know, possibly longer.
Kill on Sight players (KoS) are currently rampant in the Standalone, but it’s partially because there’s not an awful lot else to do, partially because there are no real measures in place to curb it, and partially because there are many new players to the game who assume that’s what you’re ‘supposed’ to do because that’s what everyone else is doing.

There’s plenty of room to judge Rocket on various things you feel he has or hasn’t done correctly, but I think in that particular area, he gets a pass for now – there are bigger fish to fry.

I’m not sure you understand the point I’m making. Even if he did spend all his free time surfing the forums and not y’know… developing the game, even if he personally believed that the KoS behaviour was the single biggest issue in DayZ, AT THIS STAGE, he wouldn’t have been in a position to do anything about it – he’s not been involved in the mod for a long time, and the SA is not yet at a stage where balancing player behaviour is something that needs his attention.

The suggestion that he’s ‘had forum posts deleted’ because they’re complaining about the KoS issue is laughable. If you’d actually spent any time on the forums before the launch of the standalone, you’d know that damn near every other thread was a discussion about KoS. Put the tinfoil hat away and let’s play sensible.

I haven’t gotten it yet, despite having been quite interested in it since the initial boom. Reason being, I am not a fan of the “Early Access” trend on Steam. Nor the way some early access games are reported as “being out now!” … in beta. I dare say many people will purchase such games expecting a finished product, and either demand a refund or never come back to it due to perceived problems.

It would be pretty hard for someone to think DayZ SA is a full, finished game, what with all the warnings plastered on the store page (and some in game) that say. ” PLEASE DO NOT PURCHASE IT UNLESS YOU WANT TO ACTIVELY SUPPORT DEVELOPMENT OF THE GAME AND ARE PREPARED TO HANDLE WITH SERIOUS ISSUES AND POSSIBLE INTERRUPTIONS OF GAME FUNCTIONING.”

I think its good that the Alpha is shifting this many units, but the mods of dayz have advanced so much are people going to keep playing it in its current state !

or are they just playing it for the sake of it for some sense of loyalty to rocket and the original idea !

Dayz Epoch and many other mods have full crafting and vehicles , none of which Dayz in its current state has , I know for a fact my clan are playing both standalone and epoch , but I know they will easily get bored of standalone in its current incarnation simply because it lacks vehicle support and crafting , and the other mods are fully operational and stable with hardly any game breaking bugs !

Even the mods for Arma III are coming through now and many will play the dayz esque mods for that.

If Rocket keeps up the update gig and keeps working as quick as he is doing to fix the potentially game stopping bugs he will keep that hardcore target audience online playing standalone

Tried Epoch for the first time the other day having played DayZ extensively over the past 18 months.
I found it to be an execrable care-bear-fest which totally flies against the spirit of the original mod.
Each to his own I guess, but seriously, safe zones? locked bases? you’re having a laugh!

I tried Epoch, but didn’t really like it. With the currency and trading and extremely common military spawns it never felt like DayZ. I see it as just wasteland with some zombies here and there – not the DayZ I’m used to.

Don’t forget there’s already an already somewhat fleshed out DayZ mod for Arma 3: Breaking Point. It’s one of the things that’s making it hard for me to get the SA, because now that I’m used to the A3 engine in all its glory, I have little desire to go back to even an updated A2 engine.

The only problem with the game is its still server based, servers with money.
The best thing they could of done was made it open world with a developers locked and chained servers.
They sold it to STEAM due to pressures and won a little on a after 2yr hype trickle. yes it a famous mod. yes its early access, but we really wanted a real game that’s better than the original MOD, its basically the same with the servers along with the limits of crowd control, the servers still allow hackers/re-modifications by players. Really this doesn’t work, it’s not a true based survival game that was expected after all this time in my view.

This is a comment from someone who gave negative feedback on Dayz steam comments. I have not yet played Dayz at all, the mod itself or anything else like it. I’ve been wanting it for so long and have been watching videos about it and their Devblog. Im finally purchasing Arma: 2 CO for Christmas so I can play (not the Dayz mod) but Dayzero which has been recently released but it’s more of a completed version of the mod.

Quote from Entaro:

“If you haven’t bought the game already, I would probably recommend sitting on the fence for a while to see what happens. Whenever you hear somebody use the word “potential” with regards to a video game, red flags should be going off immediately. Its true DayZ has a lot of potential. Its had a lot of potential since it first came out as a mod 2 years ago. The problem (as I see it) is that nothing much has changed. And that is a long time for nothing to change…

The argument goes, that they spent the last 18 months redeveloping the arma engine to be specific to DayZ, and that these mechanical improvements will allow the standalone to flourish in ways which wouldn’t have been possible as an arma 2 mod. But if you’ve played this game, and are being honest with yourself, then this product feels like 1 step forward, 2 steps back.

To their credit, they tell you flat-out on their store page not to buy the game, but for those of us who are DayZ veterans, its like telling crackheads that crack will kill them… pretty damn futile. 18 months later… Personally I expected A LOT more.

There is no reason for this game to be publicly avaliable in the state that it is in except to cash in on Christmas. This 6 man development team has already banked $1,200,000. Ho…Ho…Ho….

“Its got potential” and I’m hoping for the best. Do yourself a favor and don’t spend $29.99 on potential. If this game ever ends up becoming something real, spending $59.99 on success will feel a lot better.

Edit:

Jeez, such anger from fans.. Try to keep the hate down. also I havent played ’10 hours of it’, as Ive spent 500+ hours in the mod and its various submods over the years so I think Ive pretty much seen it all. Not to mention, 10 hours in standalone is more than enough time to experience everything it has anyway.

Yes, I understand it is an alpha, but its been 18 months and it was an alpha then as well. Dont fall into the trap that you are playing some new game that started from scratch, as very little of DayZ is from scratch.

Im guessing most of these trashy comments are coming from fellow DayZ junkies and I understand the diehardness of the fans. This review is moreso aimed at people who maybe skipped the mod or played very little of it, expecting standalone to be their ‘entry’ into the series. Im here to say it isnt, not in its current state.

I continue to hope for the best for DayZ SA, but given the speed of its development, especially compared alongside the development of DayZ submods over the same time period, it appears we’ll be waiting for quite a while unless something drastically changes.

I never said I hate the game, only that I have concerns about its future. Im a huge fan of DayZ, just not a cultish one. I still stand by my argument that there is absolutely no reason for this game to be publicly avaliable right now except for $$$. However, given that they have releaed it I sincerely hope that they continue to develop it to its maximum potential, but I just dont have that unshakable faith anymore that many of you still do. Because now that they have our money, its ALL faith at this point.

Im just here to say to anyone undecided or completely new to the franchise: wait for this flower to blossom. Dont sully your virgin experience to the great world of DayZ with this alpha offering.”

The three quotes underneath are terrible, this really got me. He says that “the product feels like 1 step foward, 2 steps back.” Well that’s not stating the obvious much is it? Ofcourse it will feel like that, it’s a brand new game going into a stage where it’s getting developed into the full thing. And this quote really annoyed me…

“There is no reason for this game to be publicly avaliable in the state that it is in except to cash in on Christmas.” How is there possibly no reason for this game to be publicly available? They release an Alpha stage for them to be able to make money, to make the game up as people buy. They need the cash in order to buy new software which will make the game deleopment improve as they go along. And also not to mention that it is a MMO which is a “Massive Multiplayer Online” and they have absolute no idea on how many people are going to buy this game when it’s fully released so they might need to think about buying a shed load of servers. God does this guy really think that they are just wanting cash for nothing? Anyway’s it’s not just about the cash, in order to quicken the development the key thing to that is having players in Alpha testing. Without players buying the Alpha release, just imagine how much longer it will take for the Dev team to release the game say what? An extra 2 Years developing and polishing it up? By themselves as well! So having people buying the game in Alpha is a big factor, also the Dev team also said in the game description that they recommend not buying it because it will cause a lot of problems at this moment in time. But people out there are going to buy it anyway.

“The argument goes, that they spent the last 18 months redeveloping the arma engine to be specific to DayZ, and that these mechanical improvements will allow the standalone to flourish in ways which wouldn’t have been possible as an arma 2 mod. But if you’ve played this game, and are being honest with yourself, then this product feels like 1 step forward, 2 steps back.

To their credit, they tell you flat-out on their store page not to buy the game, but for those of us who are DayZ veterans, its like telling crackheads that crack will kill them… pretty damn futile. 18 months later… Personally I expected A LOT more.

There is no reason for this game to be publicly avaliable in the state that it is in except to cash in on Christmas. This 6 man development team has already banked $1,200,000. Ho…Ho…Ho….

“Its got potential” and I’m hoping for the best. Do yourself a favor and don’t spend $29.99 on potential. If this game ever ends up becoming something real, spending $59.99 on success will feel a lot better.”

I have played for about two hours and I have to say it is a huge improvement – leaps and bounds – above the mod predecessor. I am very excited to see what they can do through the alpha/beta phase, and it certainly seems the creator is committed to achieving his vision.

well it appears everyone has stopped talking about this for a week now, but i signed up just to chuck in my 2 cents.

im am 100% noob. iv never played the a2 mod, but wanted to, until a friend told me that it was full of hackers and to wait for the stand alone, so i did. about 4 days ago i noticed the alpha and didnt think twice about adding it to cart

from a wet behind the ears point of view, this game is Amazing. yes its very clunky still, yes the zombies clip walls and the melee combat is absolutely hideous. and the map is so huge that without vehicles yet, everyone generally tends to hover around the coast line (making the northern area of the map well worth the extremely long sprint)

i could complain about how sometimes when you join a server you find yourself spawned at the coastline with nothing but a flash light and all the awesome gear u spent hours looting is gone never to be seen again

or that sometimes when you join a server you are immediately greeted with the message “you have died” say good bye to all the gear again

BUT, at the end of the day. this is the first game i have ever played that has roped me so far in i actually care about using tactics, and finding friendly people i can trust (but can never fully trust) to become members of your party

in nut shell, i actually care about my players life

most (if not all) 1st and 3rd person shooters, you find the people are so detached from their player and just run around willy nilly out into open spaces or rambo it down the middle knowing they really have nothing to lose

i have found myself crouched in a pitch black corner for 20 minutes listening with all my might because nearby i heard a footstep, or someone open a can of drink or saw some one flick on their flash light for a second and disappear

i could go on forever on how much i love this game. but i already have

its great, im impressed and i cant wait to be there as it develops

however at the moment my only true complaint is…. when im running for 45 minutes back to where its populated after spawning all the way out in god knows where i have to say it would be better named day zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, *bashes knife and fork on the table* give us vehicles please!! :D